18.12.12

Tanks - T55

Remembering The T-55 Tank

by Frank Chadwick

Tom Clancy once described the T-55 as “the last good tank the Soviets
made.” There is something to that. I think the phrase “revolutionized warfare”
is grossly overused, but the Soviet T-55 certainly represented a turning point
in tank design.

The model for tank design, and
tactics, which matured duringWorld War II, called for three classes of tanks, based on armament and protection:
light, medium, and heavy.Light tanks initially were used for most of the traditional cavalry roles,
but by the end of the war had been relegated to reconnaissance. That was a job
better handled by dedicated reconnaissance vehicles, and so the light tank, as
a class of combat vehicles, faded away.

Medium tanks were the workhorse vehicles of armored formations. Designed to
be easy to mass-produce, medium tanks were reasonably well-armed and protected,
but their protection definitely took a back seat to mobility and reliability,
while their armament was emphatically a dual-purpose gun with as much attention
paid to fighting infantry as enemy armor.

Heavy tanks occupied the high end of the tank park – heavily armed and
armored (as their name suggests), they were able to engage and destroy any
vehicle they would encounter, including enemy heavy tanks, while their armor
rendered them relatively safe from anything but the largest enemy anti-tank
weapons. They also placed a heavy burden on maintenance, logistics, and
infrastructure resources of the forward troop commands, and were difficult to
build and expensive, which generally limited the number actually deployed.

The post-war generation of tanks followed this trend, at least at first,
although the categories experienced some fairly rapid weight-creep.

The U.S. developed itsWorld War II-era heavy tank, the M26 Pershing, into a family of post-war medium tanks
(not surprising, considering the Pershing weighed about the same as the German
Panther), armed with a 90mm gun. The Pershing itself spawned the M46 (a 1948
version which was only a slight improvement over the original), the M47 (entering
service in 1952), and the M48 Patton (1953). The heavy end of the equation was
filled by the M-103, a 65-ton mother of a tank, mounting a 120mm gun (requiring
two loaders instead of one), which was reasonably-well protected but slow and
with an overloaded (and hence temperamental) drive train. It entered service in
1957.

The British post-war medium was the Centurion, another development of a
tank fielded in the closing days of World War II and equipped with an 83.4mm
(20-pounder) gun. The heavy counterpart was the 120mm-armed Conqueror, which
tipped the scales at 66 metric tons. The British built about 180 Conquerors
between 1955 and 1959, but they suffered from the same problems as the
U.S.M103: poor reliability, poor mobility, and a big logistical footprint.

The Soviets started out with the same conceptual mix, using the wartime
T-34/85 as their medium tank and the IS (Iosef Stalin)-3 as their heavy,
replaced by the slightly improved IS-10 in1952 (and almost immediately renamed
T-10 upon the death of Stalin).

The Soviet IS-series heavies mounted a 122mm gun and weighed in at about 46
metric tons, so were quite a bit lighter than the western heavy tanks. That is
significant, because it indicated where the Soviets went next with their tank
design thinking.

The World War II-era German Panzer V Panther had good protection, mobility,
and firepower. It virtually formed a class all its own — not quite up to facing
the heavy tanks, but outclassing every other “medium” tank on the battlefield.
Of course, it was a medium in name only. At 44.8 metric tons, it was virtually
the same weight as the Soviet IS-2 and heavier than the U.S. Pershing (which
came in at a bit under 42 metric tons). But it was designed to be
mass-produced, and became the largest-production German tank of the war.

The western allies essentially followed the German lead, fielding a
mass-produced medium tanks in the 40-45 ton range and a high-end heavy tank ten
to twenty tons heavier – the force structure equivalent of the German Panther
and the German Tiger. The Soviets took a different path.

In 1953 the Soviets began fielding the first mass-produced version of the
T-54, which was soon replaced on the assembly lines by the T-55. The design
merged the T-34 and IS design streams into a single all-purpose modern battle
tank. It weighed 40 metric tons, had between 100 and 200mm of armor in front,
and mounted a high velocity 100mm gun (which had slightly better armor-piercing
performance than the IS-series’ 122mm gun). In other words it was the same
weight or lighter than the Western medium tanks (42 metric tons for the
Pershing and 52 for the Centurion), had as good or better frontal armor, and a
better gun. It wasn’t going to set any world land speed records, but it was
much more reliable than contemporary heavy tanks, had the logistical and
infrastructure footprint of a medium tank, and was designed to be mass
produced.

In a stroke, T-55 rendered most of NATO’s tank park conceptually obsolete
and changed the dynamics of tank production industrial strategy. Instead of a
high-low mix of mediums and heavies, the future battlefield would be dominated
by a single all-purpose vehicle, the Main Battle Tank.

Britain and the United States both responded by declaring the cumbersome
heavy tanks obsolete and scrambling to up-gun their medium tanks to MBT status.
The weapon of choice was the British-designed L-7 105mm gun, maybe the best
all-around tank gun ever fielded. The British mounted it directly on the
Centurion while the US re-designed the turret of the M48 to accept the new gun
and dubbed the resulting vehicle the M60. (Later we would manage to fit the 105
in the M48 turret, and the M48A5 version is virtually identical in performance
to the M60.)

As good a tank as the M60 was, and it was a fine all-around combat vehicle,
it was always an expedient. Later the British would field the Chieftain, we the
M1 Abrams, the Germans the Leopard, and the French the AMX-30. But all of these
tanks are inspired by, or reactions to, that first glimpse of the T-54/55.

It is easy to forget today the sensation that T-55 caused at the time.
Eventually we would find out that the 100mm gun had accuracy problems, the
loader station was very awkward and slowed the rate of fire, the suspension
tended to shed tracks unless the driver knew what he was doing (and a lot of
T-55 drivers didn’t), but all of that came later. For a while, the Soviets had
the best all-around combat tank in the world. By comparison, all the Soviet
tank designs which followed were junk.source: http://greathistory.com/remembering-the-t-55-tank.htm